


Comfort Food

by igrockspock



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-08
Updated: 2014-01-08
Packaged: 2018-01-07 22:57:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1125385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who says home cooking isn't a weapon in the war against evil?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Comfort Food

**Author's Note:**

  * For [boosette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boosette/gifts).



Abbie learns to cook for the same reason she puts throw pillows on the couch and buys a sheet set in coordinating colors: she wants to feel like she has a home. Domesticity is foreign at first; sometimes she feels like an interloper in her apartment because nothing this nice and orderly could belong to her. For awhile -- not that she'd admit this to anyone else -- she even keeps a copy of the lease on her nightstand and looks at her name on it before bed.

Two or three months in, it finally clicks that the apartment is hers -- and that Lean Cuisine tastes like cardboard and eating at the diner every night is asking for a heart attack. So she buys a pot and skillet on clearance at TJ Maxx and figures out how to boil spaghetti. From there, she gets a baking sheet because baked potatoes can't be that hard, right? She spends the next two hours scrubbing bits of exploded potato out of her oven, and Corbin laughs when he tells her to poke holes in them next time.  
Rachel Ray is an accident on a rare evening when she actually gets off work at five, and she needs to take her mind off the afternoon's foster care abuse investigation. Abbie isn't one to joke about her gun, but she actually wants to shoot the perky brunette on the screen. But the show isn't so bad if she shuts off the sound, and before long she learns about prosciutto, balsamic vinegar, and fontina cheese. They taste alien to a meat-and-potatoes girl, but she keeps cooking with them because they make her forget she and Jenny once ate mayonnaise for dinner when Mom was gone and there was nothing else in the fridge.

Corbin is the first person she invites to dinner, and she manages to roast a chicken. They give up on figuring out how to butcher it and tear into with their hands, and Abbie never forgets the small miracle of a warm apartment suffused with the aroma of roasting meat. Corbin wipes his greasy fingers on a napkin and tells her it's the best meal he's eaten in a long time, and Abbie thinks that adulthood is something she can _do_ , and that the part of her life where she's fighting just to survive might finally be over.

She's wrong about that -- she knows that for certain when Andy shoves her in the trunk of his police car and she watches the Headless Horseman slaughter two of her own. Corbin's dead, demons are real, and a time traveler tells her she's a witness to the apocalypse, and she wishes she were a little girl hiding under the covers begging mommy to protect her -- but never did get to do that, even when she _was_ a little girl. So she puts one foot in front of the other, takes the days as they come, and _survives_ because that's what she does best. She looks Moloch in the face and thinks _bring it_ because demons have been part of her life since she was born: drugs, hunger, absent mothers, greedy foster parents who don't give a damn. At least now she's got a full fridge and a friend by her side.

She slides a plate of pot roast across the table to Ichabod and grins when he says, "Leftenant, when I taste your cooking, I do feel as if I'm back home."

She thinks, _score one for the side of good_ and slides a tray of golden Yorkshire puddings out of the oven.


End file.
